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So with FF7 NT completed, I've been preparing to start work on a follow-up mod for FF8 that'll be geared at rebalancing the game's systems and eventually adding new content like events and fights. But to do that, I need to get more familiar with the game itself and hear ideas/feedback from more experienced FF8 players & fans of the game.
So first off, we've got this Google Doc here that people are free to contribute to; it's a sounding board for suggestions on how to fix certain things that are broken or not working very well in FF8 and suggestions for things to add. There's scope to work on the game's story as well, but that's not a priority right now; suggestions still welcome on that though.
The document: https://docs.google.com/document/d/19yxhvgv-H56vZ_JPNtMV85tHyLSDfpQtqZc7xmtHrBA/edit
I've also got a challenge run on YT going where I fight each boss at their highest possible level with a party at the same level but no stats junctioned with Magic. It's to get me a bit more familiar with the game's systems and how the stats translate in actual gameplay (looking at formulas isn't very practical). Feel free to drop in and offer any feedback or advice as I'm very rusty with the game. I'll be uploading each boss once every couple of days:
Please note that we do not, in fact, have Dank Memes.

Yeah, I didn't think about it either until it hit me like a train. But you're right, he has so little HP he'll usually only get one ability off (usually a barrier) unless you focus Rufus.
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Motorball
The roughest fight so far; he's got lots of dangerous attacks, half of them multi-hit, and your performance in the bike minigame can leave characters vulnerable to a KO at the start. He opens up with a ramming attack, and then goes straight into powerful single-target physicals.
I had Cloud on Cover using the best armour which I think helped to save Barret here (I'd forgotten to reverse rows, so Barret was in the front by accident):
But unlike the Rufus fight and Bolt, I definitely knew that I'd need Fire protection for this fight to cover against twin-burner and the (probably) deadly Rolling Fire:
Fire Armlet, Fire Ring, and a Tetra Elemental accessory gave complete coverage and judging by the absorbed damage of the weaker twin-burner I'd have probably needed to go full ham with mitigation to survive Rolling Fire without the equipment.
And after a bit of back and forth, some close shaves with Arm Sword, and a few cheeky Limit Breaks, Midgar was successfully escaped.

Gjoerulv, author of the Hardcore mod for FF7 (http://forums.qhimm.com/index.php?topic=6818.0), put out a new project called the MonoMod; a challenge-restriction mod where your character stats are fixed to 1 and only have a small amount of HP/MP (270 and 90 max base respectively). However, you also get access to almost all of the game's unique equipment and materia from the start and making the best use of these is the key to survival. The MonoMod is available as an option in Gjoerulv's Hardcore mod installer so download that from the above link if you want to give it a try yourself.
This screenshot LP is broken up into segments separated by area and/or boss, starting off in the 1st Reactor.
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Reactor No.1
So starting off, we have a Lv.1 Cloud with 1 in every stat and only 10 HP/MP. Fortunately, we've also got near enough every piece of armour and accessory to make use of in keeping him alive for the first battle.
And as becomes apparent really really fast, this equipment and your approach to fights needs to be on the ball to avoid disaster.
With a level-up, Cloud's HP jumped up more than double to 22 which afforded a lot more breathing space. But while having a Ziedrich + Protect Ring reduced damage he was taking to 1, it left Barret with less effective defensive options to take and even in the back row he was taking some serious heat from the enemies further down the Reactor.
A nasty surprise was waiting when we reached Guard Scorpion. Despite using Defend on his Search Scope target to mitigate his follow-up attack, the damage being dealt was still uncomfortably high. Cloud has a Ziedrich and Protect Ring on as well, which is reducing damage even further:
It's manageable due to the pause in his attacks to telegraph his next target (and the long pause during tail raised) but it doesn't bode well for the later enemies and bosses who are far less easier to predict. I also noticed that despite having high damage output from Barret thanks to the equipment bonuses, the fight still took longer overall as Bolt had much less MP to make use of. After 3 cycles, the boss went down:
So all in all, things went well but these enemies were among the weakest in the game and with the boss hitting decent damage through a Ziedrich and the Defend command it doesn't bode too well for the future. The next area has more dangerous enemies like the hard-hitting Rocket Launchers and the area boss, Air Buster, counters all attacks made against him. It's going to be rough, but we'll see how the Materia changes things once that gets unlocked in Sector 7...

A Man and his Dog
Probably the most dangerous fight so far, Cloud is fighting solo here and as I neglected to equip lightning protection (it completely slipped my mind that Bolt Armlet and Bolt Ring were available) it meant that Dark Nation posed a very real threat here; if I'd gone with anything other than Ziedrich as well then this would have probably been a one-hit KO:
And because I'd went with Ziedrich, it meant Cloud only had two materia slots to work with from his weapon (I'd also forgotten to get a Hardedge, have I really slipped so far?) so I went with Poison and Barrier, planning to heal up using the humble potion:
I'd also burned my Limit on paralysing Rufus as well, instead of just one-shotting the dog with it. I rectified that with a Grenade:
Okay, several grenades:
I'd attempted Bio but it failed to proc the status, and with Grenades dealing more damage I decided to just go with that and pop up another Cross Slash toward the end for the win:
All in all, I'd made the fight a lot harder on myself by accident. Any kind of Bolt protection would have squared this right up, or maybe a reflect ring to bounce it back. There's a lot of new possibilities that open up with having so much gear available from the get-go.

Shinra HQ Escape: Gunners
So we've got a boss rush of sorts to deal with in getting out of here, which is a bit dangerous as Armour can't be swapped between characters so I need to be careful about putting the best stuff on the Gunners team as this'll lock it off from use by Cloud in his 1v1 with Rufus. These two also need to be done back-to-back with no save, so any mistakes with Rufus will be costly.
I loaded Aeris up with magic, have Red XIII long range materia, and put Cover on Barret for some extra defence. I avoided using armour like Ziedrich here as I suspect Cloud will need it more.
The first boss, Hundred Gunner, doesn't hit too hard but has some multi-target attacks that can cause some issues:
But boosted magic makes short work of him, namely Quadra-W-Magic Bolt boosted by a Fourth Bracelet and Circlet:
Next up is Heli-Gunner, who acts as soon as he appears. He's roughly the same, with damaging single-target attacks and multi-target:
But he's not going to last long against these Bolts:

Nothing else was changed in the mod, so damage-dealing items will likely still be as effective as they are in vanilla challenge-runs (Right Arms against Dyne, for instance). I think once HP and MP normalise a bit to what they'd ordinarily be at Lv.1 (a bit higher actually) things will start to get a bit more stable. I'll also be able to pick up additional copies of the end-game equipment when I reach them, which will make it easier to protect the entire party.
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Taking on Shinra HQ, I found the Mighty Grunts to be a bit feisty and needed Barrier to help edge through easier. I also ran into a nasty pincer encounter on the 61st floor when I got a bit impatient and tried to run past. The skater grunt was also quite evasive and tougher to hit at Lv.1.
After all the busy work on each floor, we reach the boss on F68. And because we started with all the magic Materia at the start of the game, we're able to take advantage of some status weaknesses that wouldn't be available under normal conditions:
After a couple of casts of Sleepel, we're able to dispose of the boss and his pals without too much trouble using magic attacks, which gave me plenty of time to rue the missed opportunity of saving Vinyl for Vincent's name.

Yo, Lockirby; long time no see.
When you unlock Materia menu in Sector 7, check that your Materia equip effects are as follows:
Magic Materia: Vitality/Spirit -5, MP +3%
If it's anything else apart from that (for instance, if there are any HP penalties on it) then the .exe isn't patched. The installer has been hit & miss about getting that file patched likely due to security reasons. It doesn't matter so much now, but when you hit the rank-up system it'll start to matter due to sources being altered to give +5 per use.

Sector 7 Pillar
The Sewers + Train Graveyard give access to some items that can be farmed, such as Ethers, but I figured it'd be a bad idea to stick around with our low HP/MP and bombed through ASAP. And naturally, because I wasn't looking for him, Eligor showed up:
Reno poses a bit of a threat because of his Pyramids, as the remaining characters can be taken down by Electro-rod (Paralysis) and don't have a lot of HP to tank his physical attacks.
For the fight, I decided to experiment with Fury Ring + Slash-All on Barret, so that both Reno and the Pyramids could be attacked at the same time. It didn't work out too well (Barret was first target for the initial Pyramid) and damage wasn't too outstanding:
But still better than Cloud's damage using Limit Breaks; if you don't build for attacking then it can be tricky to get any decent damage output going, so it might be the case that I have to pick between defence and offence for future fights.
But for now, it'll do; Reno doesn't have a lot of HP and he bugs out before long:
Time for Shinra HQ!

Wall Market
Aeris was recruited and I began to realise that the traditional character roles (where you'd expect Barret to be tanky, and Aeris to be strong with magic) no longer apply in this mod. Everyone's sitting on the same base stats, with the variation coming from their Limits. That means it's just as viable to have Aeris be a physical attacker over, say, Cid. This'll be handy to keep in mind when weapons start becoming more freely available as Aeris can get hold of the Umbrella weapon fairly early on.
Didn't hang around in Wall Market long, which of course resulted in Cloud being discarded as sloppy seconds for Corneo's men. Our boy got stabbed in the dick a bit-
-but, as ever, finished on top.
Then it was time to deal with Aps; I opted to go with a magic-oriented offence to get a look at how dangerous Sewer Tsunami was:
It's likely that, without mitigation, the back-attack version of this move would outright kill some party members even with their top-end armour. But we had plenty of firepower to finish the fight quickly, using Aps' weakness to the fire element, Quadra-Magic, and W-Magic for some toasty man-alligator-bull steaks.
Manigatorbull? Bulligatorman? Allibulladude? I don't know the correct term.

The fights so far have been a lot faster but more dangerous; I can kill the enemies/bosses quicker but they can wipe out the party quickly too.
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Reactor No.5
Upon reaching Sector 7 and concluding the scenes there, the Materia menu is unlocked and with it a nice surprise. Almost every Materia (bar summons) is available right away, including a mastered Enemy Skill Materia:
There's a lot of options available here, but not all of them will be viable until later in the game when we get our base MP a little higher. At the moment I can push MP up to around the 60 mark using HP<>MP Swap and HP/MP Plus but it's still not enough to cast the stronger spells (at least, not more than once). The Plus Materia themselves have been set to always give +50% to the stat instead of 10% as well, but given how low base stats currently are they're not as useful unless specifically built around. For physicals, we've got 2x-Cut, Slash-All, Deathblow, and Added Cut for more firepower.
Reactor No.5 proved as dangerous as expected, with large enemy groups and hard-hitting randoms like the rocket launcher providing some close shaves. Fortunately, rockets are quite inaccurate and will miss often if you have high evasion armour equipped and you have plenty of options for attacking multiple opponents at the same time for faster clears against proto-machine guns & special combatants:
Air Buster was a fight I was worried about due to the power of his Big Bomber attacks and the 100% counter-attack rate, which will likely wipe you out without taking due care. But as you know, this boss has a huge weakness to back attacks (in base game, 2 limit breaks to the back will kill him) and with the boosted attack power available from our equipment like Warrior Bangle and Champion Belt, the fight was over in a flash:

Feedback is generally positive, Disc 3 gets some rumbling for the leap up for certain optional bosses and the enemy toughness going from Midgar Raid to North Crater; the latest patch a few days ago cut down enemy HP and Defence though with tweaks to equipment, Materia, and enemy AI/attacks to alleviate the issue a bit. If you do give it a go, then I recommend playing on Normal mode.
Info on the mod:
Frequently Asked Questions: What is FF7 NT? https://docs.google.com/document/d/1WzpOJvhl0y08VvrhchjToVrJaART1iPYcFSoUlnCOI8/edit
FF7 NT Mod Documentation http://www.mediafire.com/file/8gsq2hylgfjxkpd/Documentation.zip

Stickied thread for current hotfix patches for the mod; typically, there are two patches that are used to maintain the installed mod to the current fixes: Scene (for enemies, items, equipment, materia, etc. issues) and Flevel (for field scripting problems).
Patches are applied over the top of the game in the same way that the Main Installer is applied, except point the patcher at the FF7/Data folder instead of just the FF7 folder.
Enemy/Kernel Hotfix - N/A
Field Hotfix - N/A
[No patch currently; use Main Installer for latest files]

Cheers, bud; I'll have arrange sorted out to handle the new .exe modifications at some point. I've got a graded unit project to finish up early June then I'll have some time to sort things out with the mod.
The prototype can be found here: http://www.mediafire.com/file/uvccds3n4ov3c1n/NT_1.5_Build_-_10th_March_2018.zip

Right, so a long time back I made an .exe to go with the mod that introduced some changes to Limit Breaks and Materia Equip Bonuses/Penalties; it didn't turn out too well balance-wise as Limits in general were too weak and the new penalties stacked too heavily on Materia so I scrapped it. Fast-forward to March 2018, I returned to .EXE modifications and produced another prototype using the 1.5 build that again adjusts Limits & Materia, but also other things like MBarrier not affecting Cure magic, Poison status & element no longer being tied to each other, things like that. The plan going forward is to have .exe modifications be part of the mod as standard as there's a lot of features and formula changes I want to make that will require it.
One thing to note is that this version (March 2018) is a prototype so there's still some adjustments to make, particularly at end-game as the Materia penalties make Arrange mode tougher than intended. Limit Break changes on the whole try to factor in multi-hit Limits versus single-hit Limits with the Lv.4 Limits having effects like Ignoring Defence while the multi-hits were reined in a bit. They're still strong, but the single-hit Lv.4 Limits should also be dealing good damage as well now in addition to their other effects. The other Limits also had adjustments, such as Breath of the Earth restoring HP in addition to Esuna (so a stronger version of Healing Wind to account for the longer charge Limit time), Clear Tranquil restoring MP instead of HP, Braver being stronger than Cross Slash, Howling Moon giving more buffs to account for Berserk, things like that.
Arrange Mode is the hard mode of the mod, but I purposely didn't call it hard mode because I worried people would play the mod for the first time on that setting and be turned off it. Arrange is less balanced than normal mode and has some bugs with events, particularly the Bizarro fight. I'll be fixing these in June when I've got some more time.

FF7 NT FAQ & Introduction
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1WzpOJvhl0y08VvrhchjToVrJaART1iPYcFSoUlnCOI8/edit
FF7 NT Documentation
http://www.mediafire.com/file/8gsq2hylgfjxkpd/Documentation.zip
Some links and files that explain what the mod is, what it does, and some other general documentation for enemy drops, steals, and the like.

I think it's to do with Steam version's saves. When the launcher starts, a check is made on all save files to check for any tampering and they get auto-deleted if they don't match. Cloud-based saves can do the same sometimes. Why square-enix felt it was necessary to add such a thing to save files is beyond me; to avoid it, it's best to keep a back-up of your saves now and then. If they get deleted, open the launcher and drop the back-up in (then save the game when you start playing to make the back-up 'safe'). But once a save file is gone, it's gone I'm afraid.

This issue with that particular field has come up before with 2 users during the Disc 1 scene, and I wasn't able to pinpoint the cause. When I have some free time from college deadlines I'll return to it again, it seems to affect specific users but not others for an unknown reason.

Master Summon wasn't originally intended to be made available but I decided to re-add it along with the other two in the end. The single-usage of Summons can be broken through the use of Quadra-Magic so when I was told about that I figured why not. I think for the future I'll need to revise how I've got Summons set up in the mod; single-use isn't a good method of balancing them on its own.

I'm sorting the rank ups at the moment, there's a patch for 1.5 about to go up that fixes them + other issues. I'll probably be uploading that patch later tonight or tomorrow once I've checked it all through.